by Jordan Dane
* * * * *
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Excerpt from Book 2 of
The Hunted
series
CRYSTAL
STORM
Los Angeles, California
12:45 a.m.
Gabriel felt his way through the darkness as easily as if it were daylight. Inside the formidable walls that surrounded the secluded estate, he kept watch of the men who patrolled the grounds. Dressed in black uniforms and armed, they guarded the posh residence in pairs.
He sensed every turn they made and anticipated their moves even before they made them. In evasive and fluid maneuvers that looked more like perfectly timed choreography, he ducked behind shrubs and crept through the deep shadows cast by the trees, almost daring the men to catch him.
The moon shed little light. That didn’t matter to a gutsy eighteen-year-old boy with a reckless spirit and an unrelenting taste for revenge. Like a child playing a dangerous game, he navigated the dark using his powerful gifts of second sight. The darkness would be a handicap only for the men who guarded the estate—protecting the man Gabriel had come to face.
As he got close to the house, Gabriel melded into the shadows and vanished. His physical body dissolved into dust that drifted and swirled in the evening breeze, but when a floorboard creaked on the grand staircase that led to the master suite, the boy crept in silence toward the bedroom where his father slept.
He opened the master suite door without a sound and listened before he moved again. Everything had come to this moment. The years of running, of hating, of grieving had gathered force to drive him here. He stood over the bed of his sleeping father and glared at the man who had ruined his life and destroyed his mother.
Hatred stirred in the center of Gabriel’s brain, and the power radiated through his body and heated his belly. It forced its way out into shooting spears of light that spiraled around him. The burst of energy concentrated its power and thrashed around him like a mounting storm—a Crystal storm.
Through the fierce light, he saw a man awake in terror and scream. When Gabriel fixed his glowing eyes on his father, he knew the man saw him for the very first time—and his last.
Alexander Reese finally understood what his son had truly become.
* * *
“No!” he yelled and leaped off his pillow.
Alexander Reese gasped for air like a drowning man and stared into the darkness of his bedroom. With his body drenched in sweat, he searched the room, looking for anything that moved. At first his eyes played tricks on him. Shadows shifted and even noises that should have been familiar made him strain to listen harder. He had to blink to make sure he was awake.
“Gabriel,” he whispered. A tear trickled down his cheek.
That nightmare felt as real as if it had happened. A part of him wanted his runaway son to be there for purely selfish reasons. Except for a blurry surveillance photo, he hadn’t seen the boy since his mother had taken him with her in the middle of the night too many years ago. Beyond wanting to see the young man he’d become, Reese never wanted to lay eyes on the boy again—for Gabriel’s sake.
Even though he still felt the haunting presence of his son in his memory, he sensed that he was alone. Only his shame lingered, over what had happened to Gabriel and his mother, Kathryn. A twist in his gut always came when he thought of his sworn responsibility to the church. He’d made a choice that had destroyed his family. He had no one else to blame, even though he believed he’d done the right thing.
Yet something more disturbed him.
Given the security at his estate, Reese knew breaching the defense measures of his home and grounds would be hard for anyone to crack. He found it odd that in his hellish nightmare he believed that Gabriel had done it.
“Damn.”
With a shudder, he sank back onto his dank sheets and stared at the ceiling with the sound of his breathing and the thud of his heart filling his head. Ever since he’d found out that Gabriel had come back to L.A., nightmares were his constant companion.
In truth, he feared his son. Not merely for what he had become, but Reese feared what he’d be forced to do in the name of duty. After he took a deep breath, he almost dismissed the lasting remnants of his bad dream, but something made him sit up and search the darkness again.
“What the hell?”
His nightmare could have merely been triggered by the chronic guilt he felt over Gabriel and Kathryn—except for one hard-to-ignore, undeniable fact. Something very real had been left behind.
The smell of Kathryn’s perfume.
Bristol Mountains—East of L.A.
1:30 a.m.
Raphael Santana paced the grassy hillside behind the Stewart Estate dressed only in jeans and boots, too restless to kneel by the grave he visited every night. A cool mountain breeze swept through his dark hair. It should have chilled the bare skin of his chest, but the fire in his belly kept him stoked with heat.
When his boot struck a rock, he picked it up and tossed it in his hands as he stared into the gloom. His heart searched this world and beyond for the spirit of a small boy who had left an ache in his soul, a gaping wound no one else could ever fill. With the moon hoarding its light—nothing but a razor slash across a pitch-black sky—the dark became a part of him. After living in the tunnels beneath the streets of downtown L.A., Rafe craved the hush of shadows.
For him there was darkness even in daylight now.
“Haunt me, Benny. Torture me. I deserve it.”
He flung the rock into the dark and heard it hit trees. The move made his side hurt, where he’d been shot in the same fight where Benny had been killed.
“You should be the one standing here, not me.”
Rafe collapsed to his knees at the grave with his throat wedged tight. He winced when he hit the ground and clutched his side. The others had left trinkets for Benny—a worn teddy bear, flowers and a toy that spun in the wind. Every time he came to the grave, he had to face what had happened to Benny. He wanted to remember the kid smiling and funny, but guilt wouldn’t let that happen.
“I miss you, little man.”
He ran his fingers over the name etched on the headstone—Benny Santana. He had given Benny his own last name and had it carved into stone forever. The kid didn’t deserve to be buried with the family name he got stuck with, so Rafe claimed Benny as the little brother he wished he had.
“I don’t know what to do.” Tears cooled his cheeks. “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Rafe glared over his shoulder and stared up at the mansion that had become his new home by default after the Believers had destroyed the tunnels. Kendra Walker and the others, like him, had come to live here, too, but that didn’t make things better for him. The place looked like a fancy castle built on the peak of a mountain. He’d grown up on the streets of L.A., carrying everything he owned on his back.
“I don’t fit,” he whispered. “Not here. Not anywhere.”
Rafe got to his feet and took off his black leather “forever” bracelet—the one that used to mean something—and left it on Benny’s headstone. He stared down at the grave marker and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. They’d buried Benny in the ground, but Rafe didn’t feel him here. He could think of only one place that the kid’s spirit might linger—the place where he died, the only real home that either of them had known.
If he had a shot at “seeing” Benny again, he had to risk going back to L.A.—and steal Rayne’s Harley to do it.
Downtown L.A.
4:30 a.m
.
In the early-morning hours, Rafe sped down the interstates on Rayne’s Harley with his body pummeled by the wind and his blood fueled with a rush of adrenaline. He’d hot-wired her ride, stolen cash from Kendra, ripped off a bottle of liquor from Gabriel’s uncle, and when he didn’t take a helmet, he wondered if he didn’t have a death wish. All he had on were the clothes on his back—jeans, boots, a T-shirt and a worn jacket.
Everything he had done felt like a one-way trip. He hadn’t given any thought to what he’d do next. He kicked the bike into high gear with the wind lashing his hair. Speed. He couldn’t get enough.
When he got to one of the tunnel entrances—the location where the Believers had staged their attack—he downshifted and hit the throttle to rev the Harley. If the bastards had staked out the place out to see if anyone would come back, he had made an unmistakable announcement of his return.
Rafe killed the engine and hid the bike in the bushes, near a thick stand of trees. He headed into the darkness of the tunnels without an ounce of fear as he cracked the seal on the bottle of liquor and downed a long pull. It burned his throat, only the start of the abuse he deserved. He felt the alcohol burn into his body and kindle a fire in his chest. His old man only drank the cheap stuff. He had no idea what he’d ripped off from the estate. Probably some fancy shit. As long as it got the job done, the kind didn’t matter.
Drunk or sober, he knew the danger of returning to the very place where the Believers had hunted his kind and destroyed everything. He didn’t care. If they came after him again and wanted a fight, he’d give them one, but as he wandered into the tunnels alone, he felt numb. He didn’t recognize the place. The Believers had come in afterward and burned everything. Kendra’s garden—the beautiful oasis she had created that had fed and healed them—had been uprooted, doused with gasoline and torched.
Their home had been wiped out as if they’d never existed.
He sucked down more liquor and wiped his mouth with his jacket sleeve as he stumbled over the old railroad track that led to the cyclops, the old locomotive that had been abandoned in the tunnels. The metal beast loomed in the darkness as he rounded a corner, half-buried in old brick rubble caused by the explosion that had killed Benny. Its bared teeth of steel hovered over the rail and its blinded eye—a broken headlight—still breathed a fierce life into the old engine that was covered in dust and debris.
Benny had loved the steel beast. Rafe stood in front of the dead train, and looked up at its busted eye as he drank—
remembering one of the last times he saw the boy.
“Yo, Benny. It’s me. I got something for ya.”
“For me?” A little head had popped out from the engine compartment. “What is it?”
“I got you something to bring you luck. Your own piece of magic.”
Not nearly drunk enough to forget, Rafe shut his eyes tight and willed the kid to come to him. Little man had played on every inch of the old rusted train. It made Rafe sad to think that Benny’s fingerprints were still on every gauge and lever, the only mark of him left behind.
“No one’s ever gotten me anything before,” the kid had said in a shaky voice. With little fingers, he’d stroked the leather bracelet with Kendra’s infinity charm on it.
Rafe pictured Benny sitting on the train’s step with that crooked grin on his face and his eyes welling with tears. The kid had broken his heart that day, but he didn’t know how much worse he could feel until he held Benny’s dead body in his arms days later. Rafe stared at the spot he’d tied the bracelet to the kid’s wrist and his eyes stung with tears.
“Screw infinity!” he yelled to no one. “What happened to forever, Kendra?”
He didn’t feel Benny, not like he sensed the dead. Who am I kidding? He wasn’t worth sticking around for. When he took another gulp, he felt dizzy and sick. Nothing killed the hurt. He grabbed the bottle and smashed it against the train. A shard of glass cut his cheek but he didn’t care.
He’d come to the tunnels—a place where he could be closer to Benny—but that place didn’t exist anymore. Rafe stumbled back the way he’d come, not knowing where he would go. He only knew it wasn’t here.
When he hit the night air, he wanted to puke. Bile churned in his stomach, mixed with the burn of alcohol. He wouldn’t outrun his booze slug to the brain. Heading for the Harley, he half decided to sleep it off, but when an arm grabbed his neck from behind, he couldn’t breathe. His side wound felt as if it were on fire, like it had ripped open again. He kicked and fought to break free, but every move felt like a crushing weight against his chest. Rafe couldn’t see faces in the dark. Men grappled with his arms and legs until he couldn’t move. He sucked air into his burning lungs in fitful gasps. When he saw stars, he felt his body give out.
“Boss man said you’d be the weak link, kid.”
Rafe felt the sharp sting of a needle stab his neck. It spread a burn under his skin, and his arms went limp.
“Guess he got that right.”
The gruff voice was the last thing Rafe heard before he drifted into a deeper darkness than he’d ever seen. Only one thing gave him comfort.
He felt Benny with him.
Acknowledgments
Real life and headlines often inspire my books and this time is no exception. Conspiracy theorists have linked the CIA, the UN and the Pentagon to the phenomenon known as “Indigo or Crystal Children,” a concept heavily queried on the internet with thousands of websites and resources to research the topic. Query Crystal child online and you will get millions upon millions of hits. Indigo kids have been featured on mainstream TV and in dozens of newspapers and movies.
For the purposes of fiction, I took liberties in my portrayal of this phenomenon, but Indigo kids are generally described as highly intelligent, gifted teen psychics with a bright “indigo” aura and a mission to save the world. They have high IQs, have been known to see angels and commune with the dead. Because they are frequently misunderstood, they are diagnosed by therapists and doctors as having attention deficit or behavioral disorders and are often medicated.
Are Indigo children real or are they manipulated by adults to believe their sensitivities are special? Are they dysfunctional misfits or saviors who must be respected as the next evolution of mankind? You decide, but I find the notion of an evolution for mankind very intriguing.
The best part of writing a book comes from those who help or add to the inspiration. They can make things gel for an author. A fellow YA author inspired my villain, O’Dell. To thank him, I gave him what he’d always wanted—a bunker. I gave O’Dell a nasty sidekick, Boelens. Since this is fiction, I made Boelens quite dastardly, when in reality he is one of my favorite people on the planet.
In the first chapter, I mention a pop-punk band, Archimedes Watch Out, a group from Lubbock, Texas. Friend them on Twitter or find them on MySpace. They are seriously awesome and quite real, unless they are onstage, when they turn into Rock Gods. Whenever AWO comes to my city, they have a place to stay and play, even at two in the morning. Love you guys!
Thanks always to my family—my mom and dad, sisters and brothers, and dear friends. To my best friend and love of my life, my husband, John, I couldn’t do this without you. For Kathryn, this time I gave you a tiara. When mentioning thanks to my family, I include my amazing agent with a big heart, Meredith Bernstein. I also include my talented editor, Mary-Theresa Hussey at Harlequin. Matrice, you have a gift for collaborating that I dearly love. Thanks for your magic touch. And my gratitude to Natashya Wilson, her amazing team at Harlequin Teen and the best PR person ever, Lisa Wray. You guys ROCK!
ISBN: 9781460300428
Copyright © 2013 by Cosas Finas
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